About 10 people have been given access, but there is no formalized project. Some people have build a few maps while others are still wrapping up other stuff or just playing around a bit to give me some feedback. Whether we end up aligning on some common goal is still uncertain. If you've got the mapping itch back and have some half baked maps to retexture or feel like cooking up some new ones using these, let me know: [myusername]@[myusername].com.

There's been a lot of good skies in the last few years. Not only has the craftsmanship been on a steady increase, but there have been some new creative uses of the palette too. Two examples spring to mind: The red-and-orange one from Bloodstain is excellent and inspired me to make a few with that color combination. The last episode in Hellbound isn't technically that great done but it works in-game and provides a fantastic mood.

Collaborative stuff is certainly encouraged, but since I've opted to have some control over who has access for the next 10 months, there is a limited set of users… if you have someone in mind, let me know though.
If it's any consolation, I started this set 17 years ago...
This is already being done but it's a dilemma: Jan van der Veken has made some texture combinations that I never thought of that look fantastic, so I certainly don't want to impose rules for everyone, or pretend that I'm the ultimate arbiter of their use. What I really would want is for everyone to have an eye for aesthetics, contrast and creativity similar to his, but since that is a rather rare gift I think the curated sub-sets could be a good start, so that when others want to use the full set they have a bit of inspiration for themes.

Progress is… at least not entirely missing, but certainly not stellar. A couple of additional people have been given access, but I think they're all busy with other projects because it's been very quiet.
I travel an insane amount for work which keeps me away from hobbies like this. For example, this month I've been in Stockholm, New York, Los Angeles, New York again, Park City, New York once more, Stockholm again, and now writing this from Milan. One month.
An approach I might pursue is to divide the 900+ textures into curated small sets to force creativity within limitations, in a "50 shades of graytall" kind of way, and assigning each subset to a map number, and opening that for applicants more broadly. This would achieve several things: It makes sure all textures get used, it forces creative use of textures, and it allows me to direct use a little bit to how I intended them to be combined.
The set is a little too diverse to just work with any combination: Afterglow sent me a map where he tries out the textures and it has like 100 of them in a single map, which looks hideous no matter the quality of the individual textures. He's more than capable of making something stunning with them of course, but that map highlights the need for some restraint and curation in texture choice for them to look their best. So a launch project that enforces this could be useful as a benchmark for what the textures can accomplish, and if combined with targeting vanilla compatibility means the textures have to do more of the heavy lifting as you can't just throw 4000 sectors in there. Also, vanilla will mostly force the maps to be a bit smaller, which could mean better odds of them getting done (unless visplanes make you contemplate throwing your computer into the sea of course, a very real risk).

I'm one of the assholes speculating on cryptocurrencies trying to make a buck from the hype, but I think what you say above is largely accurate. It's interesting how most counter"arguments" to this article is mostly people saying "you just don't get it" or constructing bizarre straw men: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100
EDIT: I mostly agree with the above article, it's the defensive responses to it from crypto apologists that are unconvincing.
I think the tech is neat and I'm absolutely fascinated by zk-SNARK so maybe it turns out some of this has some sort of carry-over to real-world value. But I'm not betting on blockchains becoming the foundation for legal tender or some sort of world computer in the foreseeable future. I'm old enough to remember the early days of web, 93-94, and the idea then for what it was for has pretty much nothing to do with what dominates the web today. Similarly I think it's still too early to say what the main utility for blockchains and trustless consensus will be.

If someone is serious about wanting to do this, ping me because I have a new 920+ texture set that is much, much better and can work for some of the same themes. Here's an example I did the other day, inspired by this thread, and a shot of a texture testing map inspired by map18 (which is a DM level).
It was always meant to be 11-12 maps, ideally getting to 32 in total by addition of a third episode (which never happened).

As we're wrapping up Darkening E2 I just wanted to say a few things.
First, thank you all for playing and for providing such thoughtful reviews! This has been a blast to follow. It's been an incredibly long time since we released this so it's hard to remember all the details, but maybe @Jan and @Capellan can fill in the blanks or correct me. Scattered notes:
Trivia
I think none of us in the team have ever met, to this day. I have a bit of contact with Jan every few years, but that's it.
All my textures are done in Photoshop 3.0.5 (which I bought a license for in 1996, and never could afford to upgrade) and most of them on a pretty shitty CRT screen with weird colors, which explains some things…
I never played Doom with music back then, both because I wanted to hear monsters better and because I couldn't stand the midi sounds. And I was not at all feeling the vibe from the music we had, but the rest of the team liked it I think, and most of you did too it seems? I was honestly bracing for a lot of complaints here so I was pleasantly surprised.
The 3-way collaboration map, 09, was pretty much cobbled together from scraps because nobody had the inspiration to finish their maps.
The level titles font is a full actual font I designed, called Starlightseed Citysightseeing, named after this song.
Alien text on some textures is chopped up bits of another font (that I didn't draw) but one texture deliberately looks like "olas bana" which means "Ola's Level" in Swedish. It's used in map01.
Gameplay
A lot of it is indeed different from current generation megaWADs, or just from the Doom zeitgeist overall. This is in part because us who made it are old schoolers, remembering the much more exploratory and careful gameplay of the early days. It's what we in the team had fallen in love with 6 years prior, and what we wanted to recreate in a new setting. To me Quake 2 style gameplay was also a big inspiration.
Working with restraint as a gameplay compositing tool rather than feeding pistol starters a bunch of stuff up front actually remains my preferred approach personally, but again I'm from a different era :-) Hell Revealed and similar projects had been out for a long time when we made this but we weren't really interested in that style.
All that said, you're all correct that the balancing is not always what it should be, even if you consider our aspirations.
Textures
I appreciate that some of you really like them, but to me they are terrible, at least in execution. Dithering, weird stray pixels, poor to nonexistent contouring/shading skills weird offsets and alignments... And almost no doors :-) But I have to give 20 year old me some slack, it's a fairly coherent set and while heavily influenced by Quake 2, there's a lot of originality as well. While following this thread I've actually created remakes of some of the core textures from this set, but at a fully professional level.
Someone referred to the sky as E4 but it's obviously custom from scratch. It was actually 3D rendered in an early version of the Bryce landscape modelling software. Also, nothing was borrowed from other games (that I know of—Nick did some textures too) other than inspiration.
Design
I'm super proud of map01 and map12 in terms of layout, but they would not exist without Jan. He's the real star of this project and while I like Crusades, it would have been more appropriate to play one of his sets I think.
We did drop the ball on color coding doors and switches, admittedly. In my mindset of more exploratory gameplay this can be forgiven a bit more, but it's still kind of lazy of us.
Map12
I'm incredibly proud of the map overall, but ashamed about the ending. Back then, the editors I used were crashing constantly and finishing this map was an absolute nightmare. It was also the very last thing we completed for the project I think, so I was just spent and wanted it out the door. The outdoor fight is not necessarily a bad idea but too easy to cheese, and the arch vile cage is pointless, those bars should have opened much sooner.
As for the start, which seemed at least slightly divisive, I stand by it. Just like map01, you're forced to run past monsters to get better weapons, thereby making sure the player doesn't just take it room by room. I wanted to reward taking risks, but also reward strategy and planning.
I actually never figured out what the fastest route through this map is, because there are so many ways to deal with it. Veinen posted a new uv max world record the other day though, and I think this has to be close to optimal in terms of route:
I think we agree to disagree on the crate jumping, but sorry about the impassable nukage!
Lastly, on an old disk I found the high-res, 24-bit version of the title pic:
Sorry for the wall of text, thanks for playing, and merry christmas!